Just recently stayed at one of the Cumbrian Cottages - the Bowering - Cunsey, in Windermere. Its described as a 5-star Deluxe apartment. A very pretty-looking place - especially in the online pictures... but its a museum of impracticality and the quality of service from cumbrian cottages is very average. The 5-star rating is highly exaggerated and its not worth the premium price they charge. Moreover, the treatment at the hands of cumbrian cottages left a very sour taste on our stay in the lake district. 1) The advertised wifi internet service did not work. They have 1 wifi base station for all the apartments to share - and its not in the top-floor Cunsey property. Not surprisingly, the wifi signal strength is so poor it isnt accessible anywhere in the property aside from one corner .. with a laptop ... and even then, very unreliable... The iPad and iPhone couldnt see the wifi at all. 2) The timber wardrobes smelled awful - and the whole place smelled horrible as a result. Apparently its the wax the timber is treated with. Whatever it is, it has a heavy smell of cow dung. 3) There were very extensive instructions on where to put the garbage - except that a key was required and no key was provided. So we were left with garbage bags piling up in the kitchen. (That said, it smelled better than the cupboards). Rather than provide a key, we were asked to "look for it - its in the property". Only on the 3rd day, when we said there was categorically NO KEY in the property, were we provided with a key the following day. 4) I tried to call them about the problems above, but I had no mobile phone network in the property. I tried to use the fancy cordless phone.... except it didnt have any batteries. As soon as you took it from the cradle, it would die. The welcome book refers to usage of the phone - but since the phone wasnt listed on the website, then apparently its ok that it doesnt work - according to cumbrian-cottages.co.uk people in Windermere. They did provide batteries - but about half-way through our stay... Ironically, they tried to ring us on that phone though... 5) The bathrooms look very pretty, except that no-one over 5 foot can stand up in the bath to take a shower without hitting their head on the low ceiling. The ceiling in the kitchen is similar - everyone kept banging their heads on the corners. 6) The sub-argos-quality washing machine would take over an hour to do a small load - and at least 4-5 hours to dry anything. 7) For a "Deluxe" "5-start" property there was: a) no garbage bags provided for the fancy garbage bin b) no simple cooking ingredients such as salt or oil. c) sugar consisted of a handful of sachets d) no toilet paper aside from the 1 roll in each holder. All in all, we didnt like the place, the 5 stars is a ridiculous rating for the quality of property and quality of service. The treatment from Cumbrian cottages was so bad, its funny: The major source of disagreement (aside from slow response to issues) came when we left: 1) They accused us of taking a towel. Not only didnt we, no-one would want to - the towels were very cheap. 2) They wanted us to pay for a towel that was stained. No towel was stained during our stay. One towel got some Calpol on it, but that washes out easily. 3) They wanted to charge us for an extra 1.5 hours of cleaning because, to use their words "the place was left in a terrible state". Now, apparently, a terrible state means leaving 5-6 plates in the sink, and 2 pots - all had been rinsed. They also complained because "pillows had been moved from one bedroom to another". No, Im not making that up. They complained about pillows being moved between rooms. They also said that they had to clean all the crockery in the cupboard as it wasnt clean. 90% of it we didnt use, whatever we did put away was clean. 4) They also wanted to charge us extra because we checked out late. Now, true enough, we didnt check out at the required 10am checkout time. However, the cleaners arrived to clean the property as we were carrying luggage down the stairs - so we did not delay them in any way. So, in the end, after various heated discussions, they duly kept some of the deposit money - which was their agenda all along, I suspect. If you love fancy light fittings, this is the place for you. If you want somewhere nice to stay for your holiday, Id avoid this property and certainly avoid using Cumbrian Cottages (http://www.cumbrian-cottages.co.uk) - at least avoid dealing with those in Windermere.